Nourish Bowls: Simple and Nutritious Balanced Meals in a Bowl

Here is a very pretty cookbook that focuses on aesthetics to such extent that the cook’s convenience remains ignored. It doesn’t seem a good cookbook editor ever touched Nourish Bowls. The cookbook doesn’t even have an author to blame, and it totally departs from conventional recipe writing. The recipes have no title, no headnotes to explain unusual terms and impossible ingredients (fregola, Cavolo nero, halloumi, sea spaghetti), or anything about the recipe. The index only lists ingredients; thus a cook looking for a previously tested recipe will be at a loss. The concept is good: serve everything in a bowl (most written for one serving) to create a complete nutritional meal. This is a British publication with American units given in parentheses. The cookbook starts with long lists of the essentials for a nourishing meal in five main parts: proteins, vegetables/fruits, leafy greens, complex carbohydrates, and healthy fats, plus any extras as toppings and dressings. Each of these is color-coded, and each recipe has the same color-coding dots. However, the ingredients are not listed separately but included within the text—quite inconvenient for a shopping list. Some instructions are ambiguous, some incomplete. To make it worse, many page numbers are missing.